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This year would belong to Dayne Crist, the fifth-year senior from Notre Dame. The next two would belong to Jake Heaps, a five-star transfer from BYU. Cummings, a 5-foot-10 freshman recruited by Turner Gill, seemed destined for backup duty at best.

Cummings had a different plan. All he wanted from coach Charlie Weis was the chance to show what he could do at quarterback, the same thing he’d asked of every coach who recruited him.

“He sat me down in his office and told me he wasn’t going to change my position just because I was shorter, just because I was below the stereotypical size,” Cummings said. “He was going to give me a chance to prove myself. If I wasn’t good enough, he would move my position. If I was, he would keep me here.”

Cummings proved more than that, positioning himself to win the starting job when Crist faltered. He made his first career start last week at Oklahoma and won the starting job outright heading into Saturday’s game against Texas.

“At this point, when you’re 1-6 and things haven’t gone real well, I think you owe it to your team to see what you’ve got,” Weis said.

The popular expectation is that Cummings will be keeping the job warm until Heaps becomes eligible next season. Popular expectations didn’t exactly pan out with Crist, though, which is how Cummings ended up as KU's starting quarterback.

“I don’t have anything to say about any other player,” Cummings said. “I just kept my faith and kept my nose to the grindstone and kept working.”

The whole thing with Cummings has been proving to coaches that he can play quarterback. Sam Jones, Cummings’ high school coach in Killeen, Texas, saw enough to start him as a sophomore, and Cummings threw for more than 5,000 yards in his high school career before suffering a knee injury as a senior.

Because of Cummings’ size, most schools recruited him to play other positions. KU was the only Big 12 school that offered him a chance to play quarterback, so Cummings signed with the Jayhawks.

“KU decided they would give him a chance at quarterback,” Jones said. “That’s all he wanted.”

That was all Cummings wanted from Weis, too, when a new coaching staff arrived after his redshirt season. Cummings is easily pigeonholed as a scrambler, which isn’t the kind of quarterback that comes to mind in the context of KU’s pro-style offense. KU’s coaches tried to keep an open mind, though, and were pleasantly surprised by his abilities as a passer.

“We didn’t put him in any box when we first got here,” quarterbacks coach Ron Powlus said. “We waited to see what we had on the field.”

KU’s coaches saw a capable backup for Crist and, later on, a quarterback with the potential to spark a struggling offense. Whether they view Cummings as a long-term solution remains to be seen, so the next five games represent an important audition.

“The more experience he can get, the better off he’ll be,” Weis said. “He wants it to be his job. He doesn’t want it to be somebody else’s job.”

Weis conceded that Cummings will face an uphill climb to be KU’s quarterback of the future. Heaps will have two years to play when he becomes eligible next year, and the Jayhawks have two prep quarterbacks — Montell Cozart from Miege and Jordan Darling from Shawnee Mission East — committed in their 2013 class. Turner Baty, a junior college transfer who is redshirting this season, also will have three years to play.

Then again, Cummings wasn’t given much chance of unseating Crist, either. At this point, long odds don't really faze him.

“As long as I got a chance to compete, that’s all you can ask for,” he said. “All you can ask for is a chance.”